Today marks the five week point and we are still excited to be here

We survived the RAID smelling room. I woke up this morning and saw a bug walking across Mike’s pillow. Apparently whatever they sprayed in the room allows bugs to live through it so the prognosis that we will survive is probably good. It smelled bad all day and night, but today it is better. The wide open window is helping, along with the deadening of the olfactory nerves.

We got up early after finding the first bug, and sure enough, there were others. Little brown bugs that look like thin lady bugs. I know what you are thinking… no, they weren’t roaches. At least they had no antennae that we could see, but we were hopping out of bed so fast that maybe we missed them. We showered (but even then we could fell the bugs all day… you know the feeling) and walked up the hill to walled city. We were there earlier than the busloads of people so we had the city streets to ourselves. It started raining so we contended with the slippery granite roads as we rambled through the old streets. We found breakfast along the way, appreciating the luxury of fresh French croissants that melt in your mouth along side our café au lait. Heavenly.

In my business travels to France I have experienced some unfriendly French, but most of those trips were to Paris where no one would help us purchase a Metro ticket, desk clerks would snarl and fellow Metro passengers would signal their disgust at us for not understanding their requests. So far, we have had nothing like that here. Our hotel desk clerks were pleasant on check in and helped us without a lot of dialog on either side. The restaurant staff and grocery clerks in several places have helped us with our coffees, sandwiches, etc. They have turned the cash register read-out in our direction so that we could make the appropriate change and laughed, together with us, at our mistakes. The woman at the train station was very kind in helping us with our onward train reservations. All in all, the French have been quite pleasant.

We looked at our schedule and decided to spend our last week before meeting up with Caitie in Italy by traveling through Switzerland rather than France. We know that one week is not enough to do either place justice but to try and see both is impossible. So, tomorrow we are off to Geneva where we will utilize the reservations we made before our trip to see some of this wonderful country. France will have to wait for next time.

Love, Deanne